


Angels and Devils

by zetsubou_hana (Sakura_no_Miko)



Category: Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney
Genre: M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Phoenix Wright In-Character Kink Meme, Phoenix Wright Kink Meme, Slash, Yaoi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-13
Updated: 2008-05-13
Packaged: 2017-12-17 14:52:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sakura_no_Miko/pseuds/zetsubou_hana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Klavier pays Machi a visit after his arrest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Angels and Devils

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://ic-igiari.livejournal.com/980.html?thread=140244#t140244%20) at the Phoenix Wright In-Character Kink Meme:  
>  _So Machi Tobaye, I am thinking... He is a bit young, but he has a crush on Klavier Gavin? He is handsome._
> 
>  
> 
> _Maybe... when he is out of the legal system... he can visit Klavier Gavin again? He could want to know why he did the legal bad thing. Still, he is handsome to Machi though he prosecutes._

The darkness was a comfort. It always had been — behind his dark glasses, behind his lies, the truth was that he envied Lamiroir for her blindness. She never had to see the way they looked at her.

And so he spent much of his time in the darkness. It wasn’t as if there was much to see in his tiny cell — tiny and alone, to protect him as he worked through the crime that had once seemed so important. He hadn’t meant for anyone to be killed. He hadn’t meant to betray the one friend he’d had. He hadn’t meant to see. 

And now, if only he couldn’t hear.

Distantly, the woman’s voice blared on and on. _“And the music world is still in shock over the loss of the Angel of the Piano, Borginia’s own Machi Tobaye. The sweet, blind boy who once captured our hearts with his brilliant piano, the angelic prodigy whose hair glimmered on the stage like wings…”_

Shut up. Wasn’t it enough to give up his sight? Why change the torment to those voices?  
Hideous, grating voices.

“The angel…”

He buried his face in the cheap pillow, willing his ears to fall off. Angel. Beautiful, precious angel. Perfect, wonderful angel.

He wanted to scream.

“You have a visitor.”

The voice was like a barrel of ice water poured over his head. “Send her away,” he barked out, as he had so many times before. He didn’t deserve her warm arms, the soft silk of her cloak, no matter how he wanted to. No. He couldn’t cry to her like a child. Better she go on with her life…away from him.

“I am not Fräu Lamiroir, so you will see me, ja?”

A shameful noise escaped his throat, then a hiccup, as he desperately tried to hold back whatever words threatened to escape his mouth. Not him. Not _him_.

He heard the doors open, the close. A heavy weight falling onto the single chair in the room. But he wouldn’t look. He couldn’t. Not even at the man who was far more an angel than he was. He wanted to look….but he found he couldn’t even conjure the man’s face in his mind.

“This…” Machi imagined his arm was moving, a perfect white hand caressed by the air itself. “This will not last long. There is much sympathy for the ‘Angel of the Piano’ outside. You are loved by everyone, ja.”

Not that word again. “I…not,” he said softly, aching to hear the words out loud, as if it would expel the pain into the welcoming darkness. 

“You are not what?”

He wanted to see that voice. The tone was low and warm, like a caress. “I…not angel,” he whispered, and his own voice was so thick he barely recognized it.

“Ja,” the man said, drawing it out, a soft “aaaah” that echoed in the air like the twang of his guitar. He moved, and when the footsteps came closer, Machi curled into the pillow again, eyes tightly shut, forcing the darkness to eat him up. He tensed at the first feeling of fingers against his shoulder, holding his breath until it came out in a rush, a low sob he couldn’t hold back.

“Beautiful angels with blond hair and blue eyes. Sweet angels of music,” the voice above him whispered, and those fingers rubbed a soft, slow trail along his shoulder, down to the edge of the flat bone, and again to the softer skin of his back. “Nein. We are not angels, Machi.” The hand stilled. “Some would even say devils.”

What? For a moment, he thought the man certainly meant him. He, who used his lies to hide his own crime. Devil, yes. Devil painted with an angel’s face. But he said ‘we.’

“You not devil,” Machi said. “You…not be devil. Cannot.” He remembered brightness, when he finally took his glasses off. When he finally saw the beautiful voice. Brightness, radiating down in the courtroom.

He felt a tiny twitch of fingers, perfectly manicured nails against the thin of his shirt, fingers slightly rough with calluses. He focused his being on those fingers. He was scared to look again, lest that sweet brightness invade his senses again. 

“And what is a devil, Machi?” His name again. Sweet, round _ma_ , and a sharper _chi_.

“Devil is man who hurt other. Is one who not care. One who take for his self.” His voice hitched on the last part.

The fingers told him everything, twitching against his skin like snakes. Fearful, little twitches, a moment without contact as they angrily clenched against the prosecutor’s palm, straining to be steady against him.

Machi shifted a little, twisting as he lay on the bed, grasping gently for the hand still against his back. “You not devil,” he said again. “Cannot. Not kind man who help many.”

“I am not a kind man.”

He shook his head, and let his fingers caress the ones in his hand. “You come, try help Machi. You kind man.”

They didn’t look at each other — couldn’t, since Machi would not open his eyes. The darkness could hide many things…the darkness could hide reality in dreams. And if this was a dream — sweet, sweet dream of those lovely hands against his own, the faint caresses from earlier against his back — then it was the happiest he had had since he came to the darkness. 

“You are still young, ja?” the man said, but it was not with his usual jovial tone. It sounded so tired. So old. The same voice Machi had grown in the darkness.

“You say I young, but you young too.” The darkness pressed down on him, but he wanted to get up. The hands were not enough. It seemed to take all of his strength to sit up, and the dizziness of light, bright and hazy, against his eyelids made him sick after so long being hidden away. “I not too young,” he protested.

“You have such a pretty voice.” He didn’t expect that tone, soft and full of something he couldn’t quite place. Something he heard often in the songs when they practiced.

“Lamiroir has pre…pretty voice. I play piano. Just piano.”

“I think you could sing. Maybe…later, I will call you to sing with me, ja?” Machi felt a flutter of warmth at it. The voice was back. A smiling voice that pulled you along like water. A voice like the hands holding his.

The voice that made him stop when he first heard it, hands falling noiselessly against hard, cold piano keys. The first voice he had ‘seen’ since Lamiroir’s — seen in brilliant sensations of warmth and caresses.

His hands were aching to remember that face as well. Not the hazy memories his eyes gave him — tricky eyes that changed things in his head — but the memories that would stay with him, buried into his hands like the notes of the piano scales. Like the voice that was burned into his ears. 

He ached to touch…but he could not.

This man…this man whose voice was like music and who radiated such light, this man who stood for such good in the world…This man was the angel. And he was a lowly devil.

He pulled back at the thought, turning his back again, burying his traitorous hands against his arms, half-hunched over, as if the thought physically pained him. Guilty, silly Machi. Had he forgotten why he was here?

The man moved behind him, lightly, treading as if trying to corner a skittish cat.

“Why you here?” Machi asked, trying to sound as cold, as uncaring, as he could.

The movement stopped. “The news Fräuleins, they say you will not talk to them.”

“I tell already. I need money. So I take cocoon.” Short, clipped sentences, devoid of feeling. 

“Ach, so I’ve heard. They want to know why you needed the money.”

“Is me to know,” he said coldly. “Tell them I not angel. I devil.”

There was…silence. Terrible silence, Machi thought, terrible. And, then, faintly, that wretched woman again, with his sickly sweet voice. _“…at the trial, it was revealed that the true culprit was none other than Daryan Crescend, second guitarist for the smash-hit rock band The Gavinners. Gavinners lead guitarist and singer, Klavier Gavin, acted as the prosecuting attorney. Fans may remember that fated case several months ago when Klavier prosecuted his own brother…”_

The silence was broken, not by sound, but by movement, the slightest trembling of the bed they both sat on.

And Machi was surprised to find that he couldn’t tell if it was his own shaking form…or that of the angel beside him.

Then there was laughter. Sad, aching laughter that made the bed tremble like wracking sobs.

“You don’t know what a devil is,” was all he heard. 

Machi’s heart cried out silently. The woman’s voice faded, replaced with the sweet, aching guitar, and the voice that had stunned him since their first meeting on the Borginian shore, locked against Lamiroir’s fingers seeking his own with warmth and kindness. He, who had gone willingly to the darkness, had been flooded with so much light —

His hands trembled again, aching. He had combed Lamiroir’s long, beautiful hair; but what would this angel’s feel like beneath his fingers? His lips had kissed Lamiroir farewell and good night, but how would the skin of an angel taste? His hands had rarely strayed from Lamiroir’s, but how did it feel to twine his fingers into the stronger, rougher hands of an…of a…

The words burst out, half-shrieked, off-key. “You not! _You not!_ ” 

He nearly jumped into the man’s shocked embrace. “You angel,” his said, half-sobbing. “You, always you. You angel for me. You save me.”

Clumsy arms wrapped around him. “Nein. Not an angel,” the man whispered near his ear, hot breath tickling, making him feel warm and oddly giddy.

“Not devil. Never devil.”

He felt the man stir against him. “Not…devil,” he breathed, then pulled the boy into a tight hug. “Not you, either.” His words tumbled out. “We are human, you and I. Nothing more, nothing less, ja?”

“Human.” The word tasted odd on his tongue. He could feel the man’s breath on his hair, the soft thunder of his heartbeat, his scent like the stage and the rush of ecstasy you felt there…all the tiny details merging into one sweet memory, sweet as the darkness, but so much brighter.

He still did not open his eyes, for fear of waking up, for disbelief of what they would show him.

His first kiss was literally blind, tentatively seeking the right part of the older man’s face and melting when he felt the press back to him. “I not too young,” he said proudly, mischievously, in a voice Lamiroir never heard. 

“Ja,” he heard in reply, “No younger than I was when…” The mouth drifted shut, whether in memory or respect for the boy sitting so close to him.

He didn’t taste like an angel should taste…a little too sharp a taste of alcohol, a hint of something smoky he’d eaten. Not like honey and ambrosia, no.

But he…Klavier…his voice that sometimes fell a little off pitch…his chapped hands…the tiny scent of motorcycle gas in his hair…the taste of cheap beer on his lips…

He was pretty good for a human.

A note from the storyteller:  
I may be accused of having too many coincidences, but, in life, far stranger things have happened, and more tangled webs woven.  
It is perhaps my own weaknesses that give this story it’s unique flair for overembellishment, and perhaps I have projected too many of my own stories on to these players.  
 _Remember, the keys to who we are lie not in what we see, but in what we cannot._  


**Author's Note:**

> Sadly, the In-Character Kink Meme has been deleted, but the rough idea was that all the prompts and fills were written in character. So, the prompter here was playing Machi, and this fill was written as Lamiroir.


End file.
